I am grateful you are going into so much depth with us. Frankly I don’t recall that ever being the case with blizzard.
I do hope we can get more pvp related events in future phases. As of right now the epic ‘pvp’ battle is just kill the ‘pve’ bosses the fastest for the rep. Giving little incentive to actually pvp and just burn a boss seems boring. I hope it gets changed to maybe a ticket system, or capture ABC till you have X amount of points.
Just did an ashenvale event where on my layer a single ally group went around and tagged all 4 bosses and won the event 3/0… without ever seeing a horde player.
Meanwhile my guildy was on a different layer where a horde group did the same thing.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind a free 2k rep dump, but the ashen event is absolutely gutted at night now. Thank god we have all these layers at 4am.
I know Ashenvale was a little buggy before but I really hate the dead realms that we got in exchange. Layer squashing was a really good feature and without it the world just feels empty and depressing.
What I loved about SOD when I first started was how alive the world felt. Could we at least have something like quick restarts after peak hours to squash the layers?
This layering change is going to kill the game. It feels completely empty now having people spread out across 8+ layers when they aren’t needed. Revert this before it’s too late.
Thankyou for your honesty and communication, Kaivax could learn a thing or two from you
Does anyone notice how LONG it takes for the battles to start now? And the rep gains are the same. So once again those that no lifed it get all the benefits and we have to slow grind
Thanks for the continued communication, explanations, and experimentation.
I’ll be another voice echoing what many have already said. Even if some don’t like the PvE aspect, the zone and event is much more populated, lively, and enjoyable when the event is able to be started every hour or so.
Some people stay in the zone and PVP. Others know that the regular pace of things is long enough to allow them to go experience something else for a bit, but short enough that they will return afterwards. When the event occurs more often, there is a momentum that builds and continues from event to event, making the zone continuosly alive.
The percentage bouncing around was definitelty frustrating. Now the very slow percentage movement is just as frustrating. The event isn’t complex or rewarding enough for people to wait multiple hours for an event to start, and people will eventually simply give up on it.
TLDR: More events, more fun, more better, imo.
I’d like to share a suggestion regarding the management of layer capacity. Let’s assume that assume that each layer has a capacity of 2000 players.
My proposal involves adding a different check to the layer management system to actively monitor the population of a layer before allowing transfers. When a player attempts to move to a different layer, the system would first check if that layer is at its capacity limit. If it is, the transfer should be automatically rejected. This process could be accompanied by a user notification, something along the lines of: ‘Transfer Unsuccessful - Layer # is at full capacity.’
This feature would align with the gameplay dynamics I assume you all aim to foster, particularly in scenarios like Ashenvale. Here, the design encourages players to increase their layer’s population naturally to trigger the in-game event. It appears that the ability for players to hop between layers to initiate different battles wasn’t an intended part of the gameplay. This would not be a thing if layers did not exist, like back in the old days.
Implementing a ‘first-come, first-served’ approach in layer transfers, with a robust check for layer population caps, allows for controlled layer hopping. This not only respects the players’ freedom to move between layers but also ensures that those already in a layer are not displaced by new arrivals exceeding the capacity.
I believe this solution would offer a balanced approach, maintaining player mobility and the structured gameplay experience that is central to our game’s design.
agreed, i would much rather just not have the ashenvale event if it forces the game to feel extremely dead during off hours. just hard to feel motivated to play when it’s a ghost town, even when the realm itself is populated
Congratulations Blizzard, you succesfuly killed your own event.
After having played the last couple days the lack of dynamic layering I feel is really hurting the experience.
The lack of players in the world feels eerie, especially since I’m on one of the most populated servers and just a few days ago it felt bustling everywhere I went.
It almost feels like I got server transferred to a dead server without knowing it.
Think I’m mostly done if this isn’t reverted or fixed. What was the point of running around as a level 25 character? The fun chaos of Ashenvale. If that’s gone, then meh.
After one faction reaches 100% can we make their kills contribute to the other faction’s progress? Or for that matter, just one number that both factions are contributing to. Even on wildly unbalanced servers, the dominant faction could still help move the event along for everyone’s benefit.
Glad you made all these changes to slow down rep gains after the no-lifers have already had a chance to grind it all fast. Now it’ll take me about three months of casual play to get Honored.
I’m about ready to quit this trash.
It’s time to reimagine ashenvale. Just give it a 1 hour timer. Every hour on the hour the event starts. In the meantime, give honor boosts and rep to wpvp. Faction limit layers. This means some layers will only be alliance and no horde. Which is fine because that will actually facilitate active players from alliance to roll horde and balance out the active player bases.
Yeah. I was considering trying to organize something on my server to have both horde and alliance fighting each other on the road between the two major towns just to speed things up, but I realized both sides would likely end up on their own layers. We’d never even see each other.
Why not just let the layer do whatever it want to do?
Create a lockout system for the PvP event boss like on retail. The players can still go around killing the boss, but they will not receive rep. Create a text saying that you are now lockout on X boss to give a hint to players that it is not a bug.
Example: If a player kills research boss they become they can no longer gain reputation from research boss in any of the other layer for 1 - 2 hour, but they can go to different layer and still kill other bosses they haven’t killed yet. This would make it so the layer can just run like normal instead of a collective punishment for all the zones.
The game is an MMORPG if the world is dead it make people not want to play since it gives the illusion of the game being dead. People like to play game that are popular, creating a dead world doesn’t help that. The solution that you guys choice hurt most of the world. Now the world feels very dead.
How is this better than just switching the event to a timer instead of this stupid % based thing?
Then you never have to worry about layers getting removed from the pool and the event % going down, and you don’t have to kill the population of the entire rest of the world off hours just so aggrends pet event “works”.
The play experience at night has instantly gone from “most lively off hour servers I have ever seen” to “dead wrath server”, the difference is stark and depressing.
Even if its a temporary emergency measure this fix is absolutely terrible, please revert this trash asap.
Thank you for the attempt but feels as if it did the complete opposite of intended. Next to no-one doing ashenvale build up (1% per 8~ minutes at 4:30pm est) due to the time it takes between boss fights. Seriously why stay and farm trash for hours if one won’t be available for the boss and that nice rep hit, which stops at revered(?).
New changes are terrible revert them its way too slow its killed the event completely.